A Tajik family who moved to Russia and changed their baby’s name to Putin to show their love for the president are pleading with officials to let them rename their son, according to a local register office chief.
Nearly six years after renaming the boy, the parents of Putin Dzhuraev, now eight, say they regret it and want him to be called Rasul once more, as he was at birth.
“The parents have already turned to us again,” said Ekaterina Belous, head of the Alexandrovsky district register office in Vladimir oblast, east of Moscow. “We’re currently consulting with them. Let’s just say they regret that they did it,” she said in a televised interview with the local newspaper New City of Alexandrovsk.
Little Putin’s cousin, named Shoigu after Russia’s minister of defence, Sergei Shoigu, was keeping his name for now, she added.
The family moved to Russia in the 1990s during a fierce civil war in Tajikistan, and have all adopted Russian citizenship. In 2016, the boy’s grandfather Rahmon Dzhuraev, a fan of the Russian president, read that an Egyptian journalist had named his son after Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
“Vladimir Putin is the number one man in the world for me. Strong, smart and educated. My grandson looks very similar to Putin as a child, and I, without hesitation, decided to change the name of the child,” Dzhuraev told the BBC Russian Service at the time.
President Putin was once hailed in Tajikistan as a great leader, with pop groups dedicating songs to him and his picture hung in homes.
Since the invasion of Ukraine last year, the president has become rather less popular among those from central Asia. Russian enlistment officers have been trawling the country’s mosques for migrants from Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, offering lucrative payments and expedited citizenship in exchange for signing up to fight in Ukraine.
However, there have been reports of soldiers from central Asia being bullied and beaten by their Russian comrades. Some have been recruited against their will or tricked into signing papers, migrants’ rights activists have told Eurasianet. In October two Tajik recruits went on a shooting spree at a Russian training base in Belgorod, near the border with Ukraine, killing at least 11 people. Shortly before being taken to the base, they had told friends that they would be meeting them that evening in Moscow.
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